Online backup, often named by the buzz word "cloud", is when you have a program upload your data to a company that will keep it safe. When you needs the data you can download it. This is very easy because the program pretty much takes care of itself, and you get a real offsite backup.
This sounds perfect, and when something does that you can know it is not:
- Companies goes bankrupt - online backup companies does too and even though your data exists the servers are turned off.
- Data loss - all the usual ways of losing data applies to these companies too. They may have better safety but not 100%.
- Got a new credit card? And did you forget to update the number with your online backup? And maby the contact e-mail address was outdated. You might not notice untill it is too late.
- You lose the password or encryption key for the backup, you lose it all.
By the way: All of these scenarios has happened within the relatively few online backup has existed.
